


Baby please come home

by orphan_account



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No IT (King), Angst, Christmas, Fluff, Gay Richie Tozier, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Jealousy, M/M, Mutual Pining, Oblivious Eddie Kaspbrak, Sharing a Bed, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:55:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21945457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Eddie doesn’t want to be one of those men that Richie brings home from the bar. He’s Richie’s friend, his roommate, he’s a fixture in Richie’s life in a way that those men never will be.And if sometimes he lies in bed at night listening to Richie fucking *whoever* through the wall and grinds the heel of his hand into his dick so hard that tears pool at the corners of his eyes - well, that’s neither here nor there. He’s thought about Richie every single time he’s touched himself for the last 12 or 13 years, so really this isn’t that much worse.If he closes his eyes he can almost imagine Richie’s in here with him. Not next door with someone else.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 31
Kudos: 766





	Baby please come home

i.

The trouble begins when Eddie moves into Stan’s old room.

Well, honestly the trouble began when Eddie was 12, he’d just figured out what “jerking off” meant, and the first time he screwed up the courage to touch himself - sinking his whole body under his Star Wars bedspread because he was terrified the whole time that his mom would catch him - the only image that popped into his mind was his best friend.

Yeah. Okay. He’s been in love with Richie for more than a decade. But Eddie’s always been perfectly willing to suffer in silence until he dies. After all, it hurts a lot less never to ask for something than to ask for it and not get it. So really - truly - it’s the third night he spends in Stan’s room, when a he wakes up right around one a.m. to the sound of a door opening and closing, and then low, pleasured moans next door.

Because next door is _Richie’s room_. Next door is Richie falling into bed with a man who isn’t Eddie, putting his hands and his mouth all over a man who isn’t Eddie, sharing spit, sweat, semen, quiet laughter, murmured words and fond smiles, with a man who isn’t Eddie.

And in here (this is the trouble) _in here_ is Eddie, listening to it.

ii.

Now for 10 indisputable and objective facts about Richie Tozier.

1\. Richie’s not funny. He’s so, _so_ not funny. All his jokes are dick jokes, and they’re not even _good_ dick jokes - he only thinks they are because everyone laughs at them, but people only laugh because his set times are always after midnight, when everyone has been awake and drinking for long enough that their own fucking fingers are funny. Eddie’s never laughed at a single one of his jokes. Not _one_. (Okay. Maybe _one_.)

2\. He drinks too much. He tries to pass it off as an “occupational hazard,” but Eddie is pretty sure being a part-time bartender doesn’t require actually _doing_ shots of mellon ball - just serving them. Richie has a t-shirt with all their phone numbers on it and “if lost please return to,” but he only remembers to wear it maybe 10% of the time he goes out, which means for the other 90% one of them has to wait up until he either gets home or stops texting them - a good indicator that he’s blacked out - at which point they’ll go retrieve him. Eddie’s sat in too many hospital waiting rooms waiting for Richie to get his stomach pumped, and with his hypochondria - it sucks. It’s awful. But he can’t leave.

2.5. Mostly, it sucks being in the hospital with Richie because Eddie was the only one who was there that night in 2015. And going back - sitting by Richie’s bedside again - makes him remember. The taste of his heart lodged in the back of his mouth. Shitty coffee. His hands shaking for three days straight. Sudden, terrible knowledge - this could all be taken away. His best friend, the love of his life. And Richie could be the one to take it from him.

3\. He can’t sing. Out of everyone in the loft, he’s the worst of them, warbling in the shower every morning (afternoon, his “morning”) loud enough that they can hear it in the kitchen. He never gets the lyrics right, either - he likes to substitute words in, like Mad Libs, and one time in the middle of a dinner party with Bill’s girlfriend they’re treated to an entire rendition of _Take Me Home, Country Toads._

4\. Richie’s the only person Eddie’s ever really, _really_ wanted to touch. He can handle the other Losers touching him - shoulder bumps and hand squeezes and hair ruffles - but he doesn’t _like_ it, per se. He’s never liked touching people, not when all he can think about is the millions of germs they’re passing on to him, but somehow it’s different with Richie.

And it doesn’t make sense, because Richie is maybe the grossest of all of them, but Eddie has never had any problem sharing a hammock, rolling close to him on Ben’s basement floor in a sea of sleeping bags, sharing mugs of coffee on Sunday morning. There’s something physical about it, visceral - like he’s not just yearning in his heart. Like his whole body misses Richie. From time to time he’ll catch himself staring at Richie across a room, looking at the unwashed, unbrushed mess of his hair, wanting nothing more than to put his mouth on it and feel the warmth of Richie’s forehead against his lips.

5\. Eddie will never, ever tell anyone, but Richie’s constant teasing was the only thing that got him through the whole Munchausen by proxy episode back in high school. It was like exposure therapy - the more Richie joked about it, the less massive and life-altering it all seemed.

To this day, Eddie’s not sure if Richie knew what he was doing, if he knew he was helping, or if he was just being an asshole. Somehow he thinks it’s the first option. Because - and here’s the real #5 - secretly, Richie’s a big old softie.

6\. He makes the worst fucking smoothies on the planet. He’ll swear up and down that _Eddie’s_ smoothies are the worst, but that’s insane because Eddie’s smoothies are full of great healthy stuff like kale and vitamins and protein powder, and Richie’s are mostly chocolate syrup and those disgusting goopy strawberry preserves they put on top of pancakes. Which Eddie knows, because Richie has never cleaned the blender once in his entire life, despite the literal gazillions of times that Eddie has asked him to.

7\. He’s quit smoking 8 times. Well, either 8 times or 20 times, depending on who you ask - Richie and Bev both swear it’s 20, but they consider no cigarettes for 24 hours “quitting,” whereas Eddie thinks you have to go at least a week.

One time Stan and Eddie locked him in a windowless closet so they could scour the loft for all the packs of menthols that he and Bev had stashed away, but by the time they declared themselves finished Richie had managed to wriggle through the vent into Ben’s room, helped himself to the pack he kept duct taped to the _outside of the building,_ and smoked half a pack on the roof.

7.5. Part of Eddie is always, always thinking about lung cancer. He’s scared Richie’s going to die before he’s 50 because he treats his body like shit.

One time they got into a screaming argument at the dinner table over Richie not eating his asparagus - standing up, red in the face, the rest of the Losers dead silent, yelling horrible, horrible things they didn’t mean - and at last Eddie burst out, “I don’t want you to fucking die, Rich!”

Richie went quiet, breathing hard, and they stood there in silence for a long minute - Eddie knowing in his bones that Richie was thinking of the same thing he was, that night in 2015 and Eddie crying with his face buried in Richie’s stomach, the crinkling hospital gown, the dark maw of night. Richie left the table without saying anything, but the next morning over coffee, Eddie in his work suit, half out the door, Richie in pajamas, he told Eddie in a low, remorseful voice that he’d quit smoking. That was his longest attempt - 10 weeks.

8\. Sexually, he’s way out of Eddie’s league. Eddie’s walked in on him, heard him through the walls, been regaled with enough tales of his gay awakening to know that for absolute certain. Eddie’s only had sex with one person - his prom date, back in high school, an overbearing girl named Myra who’d sat behind him in health class.

Really, he did it just to get it over with. No one wanted to take their virginity with them to college - so he screwed his eyes shut and fumbled around and did his best, and then afterwards he stumbled out of the car with his pants still undone around his soft dick and puked in the middle of the parking lot. He told Myra he just had too much to drink, but really he was stone cold sober. It was just - she wasn’t the one he wanted to be touching.

So, Eddie and those guys he hears moaning porn star moans from Richie’s room - they’re not even in the same _universe_.

9\. Richie’s never been in love. Eddie knows because he knows _he’s_ been in love - _is_ in love. Every time he looks at Richie he gets this feeling like there’s a hand inside his chest, and sometimes it’s cradling his heart, sometimes it’s squeezing it, but it’s always, _always_ Richie’s hand. Richie’s never felt like that about anyone; Eddie would know. Or Stan would know. Or Bev. And they’d definitely tell Eddie.

10\. He’s a lot of things to Eddie. He’s his best friend, his oldest friend. He’s a pain in Eddie’s ass, a thorn in his side, a constant headache. He’s the only person Eddie wants to see when he’s sick, the only person who can work Eddie into a blind rage in less than a minute, the only person Eddie’s never needed words to talk to, waggling eyebrows and trading glares across crowded rooms. He’s his confidant - even though it’s a terrible idea to confide in Richie with trivial things, he keeps a secret when it counts - his partner at beer pong and karaoke and pool, the only person Eddie knows without a doubt he’d walk through fire for.

But most of all, above all that, he’s always been an impossible dream.

iii.

Eddie knows there’s a certain degree of intimacy that’s incomprehensible from the outside.

Stan and Patty have it. They had it before they were married - with their birdwatching weekends and theirmatching Halloween costumes - and they definitely have it now. You can always tell when two people are sleeping together by the way they are around each other, like personal space doesn’t matter.

But when it’s more than just sex, when two people have decided to spend their lives together, there’s this added layer of closeness - like they inhabit their own separate world that no one else knows about. Eddie first notices it when Stan brings Patty over to the loft for dinner a few months after they start dating, when Richie’s just made a horrible joke, Stan’s staring deadpan at him over a bowl of creamed carrots until Patty fails to hide a smile behind her wine glass and Stan’s disapproving mask just _cracks_.

Bill and Audra have it, too. Their breed of intimacy is louder than Stan and Patty’s, in the bedroom and in the kitchen - they go on dates at odd hours to accomodate Audra’s schedule at the restaurant, 7 a.m. strolls on the beach and 3 p.m. dinners that Bill has no problem making it to since he’s still living off the proceeds of his first novel while he writes the second. They’re hectic, but they make it work. To Eddie, it’s like there’s this wire connecting them through time and space whenever they’re apart, so whether it’s days or weeks or (when Bill goes on his book tour) months, they’re always on the same wavelength.

Bev and that scumbag Tom never have it. Before the night when Bev comes home with a black eye and a bare ring finger, Eddie just figures they’ll get there eventually, even if it takes a little longer. He doesn’t _like_ Tom, per se, but he’s not the one marrying him, so keeps his uneasiness about the guy - with his sharp suits and his shark smile and the way he always calls Bev “babe” like she’s a waitress or a stripper or his fucking secretary - to himself.

But then Tom reveals his true nature and they all drive over to his office in the middle of the night to commit some light vandalism and when they get home, full of adrenaline after running from the cops and speeding home in Richie’s pickup truck, and Ben skids through the front door of the loft and sees Bev standing there with a bag of frozen peas pressed to her face, grinning wide even with her split lip, and he says, “God, Bev, I fucking love you,” and - well, _they_ have it.

Eddie’s never going to have it - he’s known that for a while, now. He just doesn’t have the capacity for that sort of relationship, can’t see himself being comfortable with that sort of closeness. Not with anyone who isn’t Richie, at least. And Richie’s never going to love him like that.

iv.

In their sophomore year of college, Eddie hits a dog with his car. A husky.

It doesn’t make any sense, because Eddie’s always been an extraordinarily cautious driver - so cautious that the guy at the DMV who administered his driving test asked him if he was a plant, sent from headquarters to make sure everything was up to code. He checks his mirrors enough times that it’s probably symptomatic of some sort of neurosis, he never drives above 60, and he still gets heart palpitations when he has to change lanes. But somehow - he hits a dog.

Most people, when they go through traumatic events, don’t really remember much when it’s over. But Eddie, because he’s Eddie, remembers everything in stark hyperrealistic detail. He remembers the silence right after it happened, sitting on that dark empty road with his foot pressing the brake to the floor, his headlights and the thundering sound of his heart beating in his ears, in his skull. He remembers that he almost forgot to turn the parking break on when he got out of the car, remembers scrambling to open the boot and the car beeping serenely to tell him he wasn’t wearing his fucking seatbelt and how heavy the dog was - fluffy blood-matted fur, hot in his arms - when he lifted it off the pavement.

He doesn’t know how he makes it from the animal hospital back to the dorm, or how he ends up standing in front of the door to Richie’s room instead of his own, but he stants there in the quiet hallway - most of the college gone for Christmas break - and realizes he’s shaking, all the adrenaline and panic going out of his body in one long, cold stream.

He raises his hand and knocks. Knocks again, harder.

The door swings open, and then Richie’s there in his pajamas, one side of his face creased from the pillow, shoving his glasses on and blinking at Eddie like he just woke up. He did just wake up.

For a minute he just squints, not saying anything, but then it starts to register - Eddie sees it start to register, the annoyance draining off Richie’s face, replaced by wide-eyed confusion, and something like fear. “Eddie,” he says, very carefully. “Why are you covered in blood?”

Eddie looks down and realizes he’s covered in blood. “Oh. Huh.”

Richie looks both ways down the hallway, yanks Eddie inside, and closes the door behind him. In the warm dark stillness of his room, it hits Eddie harder than ever - jesus christ, he just hit a dog.

His legs go out from under him. Richie catches him, and they end up sitting on the floor next to Richie’s overflowing laundry hamper and a pile of Bill’s redlined creative writing homework, Eddie thunking back against the door and Richie kneeling over him, patting him down like he’s looking for leaks.

There are words coming out of his mouth. “Eddie,” he’s saying, “Eddie, what the hell, did you murder someone? Where’s the body? What did you do with the murder weapon? Come on, you’ve gotta - Eddie, if you go to jail for murder I’m gonna have to rob a bank or something to get in there with you, and I don’t really want to go to jail, I’d be a really terrible prison bitch with all this body hair, so just tell me where the body is so we can get rid of it. Eds - “

“Don’t call me that,” Eddie says, automatic.

“Hey!” Richie laughs, high and nervous. “He speaks. Jesus, Eddie, what the fuck.”

“I hit a dog,” Eddie says. His own voice sounds very far away, but Richie’s hands on his face - squeezing the back of his neck - are so close they feel like they’re on the inside of his skin. “I ran into a dog with my car, Rich. A husky. It came out of fucking nowhere - ”

“A husky,” Richie breathes, relieved. “Okay. Just a husky.”

“For fuck’s sake, Rich, it’s not ‘just a husky,’ I hit a _dog_.” Eddie feels panic clawing its way up his throat, feels his breaths getting tighter and shallower. “Oh fuck. Oh fuck. I hit a dog.”

Richie’s big hands sandwich his head. “Come on, Eds, just breathe.”

He demonstrates - taking big, bellows breaths in and out, in and out. They’re so close Eddie can smell Richie’s morning breath (middle of the night breath), and it’s that more than anything that yanks him back into the current moment, Richie’s bare, hairy feet and Bill’s Agatha fucking Christie poster on the wall - god, where do you even _get_ an Agatha Christie poster? - and Richie’s eyes big and googly and earnest behind his coke bottle glasses. He grabs Richie’s wrists and breathes with him, until he stops wanting his placebo inhaler, until it all slows down, until the hot inescapable weight of guilt starts to slough off his shoulders.

“Is the dog okay?” Richie asks, after a few long minutes where they just sit, touching each other and not moving. “I mean, is it dead, or...”

“The vet said she’ll recover,” Eddie says. “But there was so much blood, Rich, I hurt her so bad.”

Richie pulls him in and presses a kiss to his forehead. “It’ll be okay, Eds.”

Eddie has big ideas, that night, about going back to his room and being completely fine about everything by the time the sun comes up.

But he only makes it through his shower - dog blood swirling thin in the water around his feet - and halfway through brushing his teeth before the panic starts to boil in his stomach again, and then five minutes later, hair still wet, skin scrubbed fresh and pink, in his pajamas, he finds himself standing in front of Richie’s door again. He hesitates for a long minute, considers sitting down right there in the hallway and waiting to go back to his own dorm until morning, but Richie must have some sort of sixth sense for people lingering outside his door.

They somehow both fit on Richie’s twin bed, and Eddie doesn’t think about how he’s under the covers with the guy he’s been in love with since he was 12 years old, because tonight it’s just his best friend, and he needs him. Richie has grand valiant ideas about holding Eddie through the night like he’s some sort of swooning princess, but he’s out cold before the first hour’s up, exhausted from the effort of keeping up the jokes and the encouraging smiles while Eddie’s just laying here, tight-lipped and clingy.

Eddie stays awake all night.

He listens to the sound of Richie’s snoring, watches the familiar shape of him in the dark. Richie sleeps sprawled out like an octopus, so even though propriety and nerves would usually demand Eddie keep at least a foot of space between them, he can’t.

He doesn’t really want to, anyways. He lets himself sink into Richie’s body, presses his face into the side of Richie’s chest, just below his armpit, where the smell of him is strong enough to block out everything else - the night and the deserted silence of campus and the memory of the noise the husky made when Eddie picked her up.

And come morning - when gray predawn sunlight is just starting to bleed through the hanging bedsheets Richie and Bill use as curtains - well before Eddie knows Richie will start to stir, he puts his arms around him and murmurs, so quiet he can hardly hear himself, “I’d help you bury the body, too.” It’s the closest to a love confession he’s ever going to get, but to him - even with Richie asleep and drooling on the pillow - to him, right now, it feels like it might be enough.

3 days later, Went and Maggie Tozier adopt a dog.

v.

Eddie applies to med school when he’s drunk, which makes the fact that he actually gets in about a hundred million times more surprising.

They’ve all been out of college for a few years, except Mike, who never went - he insists backpacking through Asia was “its own kind of college,” but Eddie personally thinks that’s the most esoteric crunchy bullshit he’s ever heard. Eddie’s been working a soul-sucking risk analysis job for a good 18 months, but one night they’re all wasted on cheap strawberry lemonade flavored vodka - it’s “girls night,” so Bev gets to pick the liquor - and Eddie confesses during an ill-advised game of truth or dare, which has already caused Ben to almost fall out a window yelling RICHIE TOZIER HAS A HUGE DICK and Stan to tell them more than they ever wanted to know about his and Patty’s sex life (pegging!), that he’s always wanted to be a doctor.

This prompts a complete abandonment of truth or dare and a coordinated effort by all seven Losers to submit as many med school applications as it’s possible to submit smashed at one in the morning. Eddie has MCAT scores on file that he was never planning to use, and they mostly forge the necessary letters of recommendation - he completely forgets about it when he wakes up, and doesn’t remember until six months later when he starts getting acceptance letters in the mail.

He can’t afford med school, not if he wants to keep paying rent and eating, and he tells them all as much.

For a few days, he notices them whispering behind his back, stopping conversations when he walks into the room, and at one point he knocks on Richie’s door and Bill throws an entire notebook out the window on instinct - all of which makes sense when they sit him down after dinner one night and Bev tells him, “We’ll cover you. Food, rent, utilities. Bill did the math - if we all pitch in, we don’t even have to cut back that much. And you can pay us back when you’re a big, accomplished heart surgeon.”

Eddie’s actually, literally speechless. He looks at Richie - for confirmation? for encouragement - and Richie’s got this big, goofy smile on, and he says, “We’ve got you, Eds.”

Eddie may or may not burst into embarrassing, snotty tears. If he does, the rest of them are good enough not to mention it - after all, he has the best fucking friends in the entire fucking world.

vi.

It’s not jealousy that Eddie feels when he hears Richie moan through the wall.

He doesn’t want to be one of those men that Richie brings home from the bar, tangled up in him for one night of blurry passion and gone before the sun comes up. He’s Richie’s friend, his roommate, he’s a fixture in Richie’s life in a way that those men never will be.

He knew Richie when he was a gangly, awkward teenager and a pothead college kid and he was there the first time Richie got on stage at an open mic night, wolf whistling with the others at the back of the bar. He wouldn’t trade that for sex - even really good sex. (Not that he knows what really good sex is like, but that’s neither here nor there.)

And if sometimes he lies in bed at night listening to Richie say _Fuck yeah, take it_ through the wall and grinds the heel of his hand into his dick so hard that tears pool at the corners of his eyes - well, that’s neither here nor there, either. He’s thought about Richie every single time he’s touched himself for the last 12 or 13 years, so really - this isn’t that much worse.

If he closes his eyes he can almost imagine Richie’s in here with him. Not next door with someone else.

vii.

Eddie doesn’t really have phobias - he has _concerns_. They’re valid concerns, reasonable concerns - the only thing that’s unreasonable is how many of them he has in a day. In an hour. In a minute. He’s been to therapy, and he’s on anti-anxiety medication, but it only sometimes helps.

The therapists confirm what he and everyone else already know - that all those years with his mom, living under the looming specter of terrible life-threatening diseases that he didn’t have, made him his way. She made him afraid of everything, afraid of the air and invisible germs and his own fucking shadow. It’s his friends that made him brave, gave him the courage to jump in the reservoir and ask a girl to prom (even though he was already pretty sure, secretly, that he was gay), his friends who became his safety net, his anchors, his _home_ when he found out the true depths of his mother’s abuse.

But even now, living with his friends full time and with literally half a decade between him and the last time he ever spoke to his mother, Eddie’s still Eddie. He’s still a hypochondriac, still a germaphobe, still a huge fucking worrywart. It’s just who he is.

He worries Richie will catch an STD. He flips through his med school textbooks endlessly at night by the solitary light of his desk lamp, listening to Richie and _whoever_ laughing in the shower down the hall and reading about syphilis and HPV and genital warts, looking for symptoms that he’ll be able to recognize without pantsing Richie in the middle of the kitchen.

He worries one of Richie’s random conquests will turn out to be an axe murderer, that he’ll wake up to screaming at 2 a.m. (a different kind of screaming) and discover Richie dead in bed and the anonymous gay lover on the lose, hunting the rest of the Losers for sport. One of these concerns is more reasonable than the other, he knows - but he can’t help thinking about both, being kept up at night by both.

He worries the Losers will grow apart. Stan’s living in the suburbs and talking about starting a _family,_ and Eddie knows Bill well enough to see that he’s planning on asking Audra to move in with him. Mike hasn’t lived in one place for more than a month since they were in high school, and with Bev and Ben it’s only a matter of time - they’re a couple, they’re not going to want to live in a loft with their childhoold friends forever.

Eddie hasn’t failed to notice that he’s the odd man out in this scenario. Richie has plenty of people who aren’t Eddie - other stand-up comics and people from the bar and friends from college and the guys he brings home, night after night. Eddie just has the Losers. So if they split up, then it will just be Eddie - Eddie in a sad, tiny studio apartment, suffering through med school in total isolation.

He worries he’s making a mistake, leaving risk analysis for med school, which has always been the same sort of unreachable sort of fever dream as being with Richie. He worries Richie will get discovered and have to move across the country - but that’s only a mild worry, because Eddie got into plenty of second-rate med schools in the Greater Los Angeles area, so he can transfer if he has to, and Richie’s jokes aren’t that funny anyways.

(He’d have to go with him, though. Eddie doesn’t trust Richie not to drink himself into a coma or get diagnosed with lung cancer and never tell them or try to OD again. It probably goes without saying that he worries about that a lot, too.)

He worries about less important things, like their romaine lettuce getting recalled for e. coli and black mold growing in the shower because Eddie’s the only one who cleans it - and with only one shower for this many people, he can’t keep up. He worries about that mole on the back of Bill’s neck. He worries about Bev still working in a job where she has to see Tom from time to time - where she sometimes comes home looking like a ghost and very deliberately not talking about something that happened. He worries that there might be asbestos in the basement archive where Ben works - the museum hasn’t been checked since the 1980s, and OSHA’s methods were shitty at best back then. He worries that Stan and Patty won’t be able to have kids, because he knows they’ve been trying and it’s been a while, that Mike will lose his passport in some remote African country and end up stranded, upriver without a paddle.

And in the small, lonely hours of the night - when he’s been up cramming for a test so long that he sees scantron sheets when he closes his eyes, when all he can do is lie on his back staring at the ceiling and watch anatomical diagrams whizzing past at the speed of light - he worries that none of the Losers actually like him. That they just let him hang around because of Richie, because he was Richie’s friend first. And then he worries that Richie doesn’t actually like him, that Eddie’s somehow attached himself to him like a leech and Richie’s given up trying to get rid of him - because, after all, what do they really have in common? What sense does it really make, for them to be friends?

That’s a stupid thing to worry about, of course. Eddie knows that. The Losers love him - Richie loves him, if not quite in the way he wants.

Even if he didn’t feel it - the warm, protective bubble of their love - they’ve certainly shown him enough. He has enough proof, enough evidence. They’re _paying his rent,_ for fuck’s sake, feeding him and clothing him.

(He was so tired one morning after a double shift at the hospital that he grabbed one of Richie’s shirts out of the dryer and didn’t even fucking realize until he walked in the classroom and someone wolf whistled and shouted, “Nice tits, Kaspbrak!” It was a joke shirt. It had boobs on it, because of course it did. Eddie flipped it inside out. Richie laughed for 3 days when he found out.)

They were the ones who got him through throwing out his inhaler, through “asthma attacks” that were really just panic attacks, through days and days of feeling like he’d forgotten something life-threateningly important because he hadn’t taken his placebo pills.

The only times he’s ever caught himself _not_ worrying have been with Richie. When they were kids, sharing a hammock, smelling like sunscreen and teen BO and getting worked up into such a rage about something dumb that Richie’d said that he forgot everything else - getting worked up into such a _something_ about the red scrape on Richie’s knee, thinking about the taste of blood and the feeling of Richie’s skin against his, that he got irrationally angry about a “your mom” joke and forgot everything else.

And now, every time he and Richie end up alone together in the loft for a night and settle in on the couch to watch _T2: Judgement Day_ or _Empire Strikes Back_ or fucking _Bill and Ted_ -his best friend and a bowl of popcorn and joking and laughing in this big bubble of contentment and nostalgia, so happy for those few hours, looking at the familiar shape of Richie’s smile and the graceless sprawl of his body, that he doesn’t even reprimand Richie for putting his bare feet up on the coffee table. Doesn’t even argue when Richie calls him _Eds_.

viii.

The tenth time Richie has to get his stomach pumped, Eddie’s already at the hospital when he gets the call, because he’s a fucking intern here now.

He stands outside the exam room in the E.R. while the attending does the procedure, his arms folded against the sudden chill of the artificially cool air. He’d been asleep in the on call room five minutes ago when the buzzing woke him - not his pager, but his cell phone - and he hadn’t stopped to grab his sweater on the way downstairs. His body is still half-warm, his whole system confused.

Richie doesn’t look like Richie, in there on the bed, hooked up to a dozen tubes and mobbed by nurses. He never does, when he’s been drinking this much - he always turns into a strange shell of himself, like some demon has taken over wearing Richie’s skin, making him hate himself, making him cry and slur his words and say in between dirty jokes, “I want to die, Eds. I want to die. I don’t know why I’m alive.”

Eddie never feels like enough, when Richie gets like this. He always wants to call someone - have the others come down here to help prop Richie up - but he can’t, because he promised Richie when he made Eddie his emergency contact back in college that he never would.

Eddie feels complicit in what Richie’s doing to himself. He sits by Richie’s bedside after they’ve pumped his stomach, while Richie’s still so out of it that he can’t open his eyes all the way, in the quiet stillness of the ICU upstairs, and he feels like he’s condoning this. Like he’s letting Richie - _god,_ like he’s letting Richie hurt himself.

He’s ignored a half dozen pages from his attending, but he doesn’t care - can’t bring himself to worry about the end of his medical career. All he can do is sit here and listen to Richie’s heart monitor and nurse this enormous, cold darkness inside of him. This awful, unnameable feeling.

Richie wakes up after 2 hours.

Eddie hasn’t looked at his pager, or his phone, or any of the magazines spread out on a table in the corner. He’s just staring at Richie’s hand on the hospital blanket, the red band around his wrist that says he’s allergic to penicillin, the odd bent angle of one of his knees, hanging over the edge of the bed, a weight on his shoulders and a certainty in his mind that he would do anything, give anything, sacrifice anything, to make Richie happy. To make him stop feeling this way, take away whatever sickness inside of him makes him drink and crack self-deprecating jokes and tell Eddie he wants to die. Jesus christ. Eddie can’t - he doesn’t think he can do this an eleventh time.

“Eds?” Richie asks, groggy.

Eddie retrieves Richie’s glasses from the bedside table and eases them onto his face. Richie blinks owlishly at him, in that disoriented way he always does when this happens - and Eddie sees the exact moment he realizes what happened. “Oh,” he doesn’t even seem surprised. “Sorry about this, Eds.”

Eddie sits back down, lips pressed tight. “I can’t keep doing this,” he says.

Richie doesn’t look surprised by that, either. “Okay. I can remove you as my emergency - ”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Eddie snaps. He meets Richie’s eyes for a long moment, and understanding passes between them - that Eddie’s not going anywhere. He’s not running away. He’s just tired. He scoots his chair closer to the edge of Richie’s bed and grabs his hand, and squeezes it, probably harder than you _should_ squeeze someone’s hand after they’ve had their stomach pumped, but it doesn’t fucking matter because Richie’s an old pro. “Don’t you dare.”

“I won’t.” Richie squeezes back, weaker. “Pinky promise.”

“Remember,” Eddie starts, haltingly. He has to say this, even though he’s terrified. It’s now or never, for some reason. “Remember when I hit your parents’ dog in college, before she was your parents’ dog. And I came back to your room, and you told me that if I went to prison you’d have to go to prison, too. Well, you can’t die, Rich. You can’t die, because then I’d have to die too, and I’m - I’m scared.”

More reflex than choice, Richie reaches out and latches onto his shoulders, IV lines be damned. “You’re not gonna die, Eds, I’m not gonna let that happen - ”

“Listen to me, you idiot.” Eddie puts his hand on Richie’s stomach, then digs in, fingers crinkling in Richie’s hospital gown. Underneath, his body is warm. “If you die, I’m going too. Non-fucking-negotiable. And I don’t think I can keep you alive on my own anymore, it’s too much - you’re not even helping me, Rich. You don’t care if you live or die, it’s just me, because you won’t fucking tell the others, and I can’t - it’s too much. I need help. From you, or - from our friends. I can’t do it alone anymore.”

Richie’s face is wide open. Eddie feels, in that moment, like he can see straight to the soft bloody core of him, like if he moved his hand off Richie’s stomach or leaned in and pressed their lips together, Richie might fly apart into a million pieces.

“Eddie...” he murmurs, and moves a hand to touch his face. “Jesus, I’m sorry.”

“I don’t need apologies,” Eddie pushes Richie’s glasses back up his nose. They were starting to slide down. “I never need you to apologize, Rich. Not about this. But I do need you to let me call them.”

Richie catches Eddie’s hand before can pull it away, presses it to his mouth, and just holds it there for a long minute, eyes closed - almost meditative. Eddie lets him. He’d let Richie do anything he fucking wanted with his body, and this is the very, very least of it.

Then Richie lets go of his hand, falls back into the pillows - deflated - and says, “Okay. Call the cavalry.”

30 minutes later, Richie’s hospital room is full of people. Stan’s wearing a matching pajama set with birds on it and an overcoat thrown on, Bev’s trying to use Richie’s deception to leverage him into letting her re-do his entire wardrobe, Bill’s brought everyone adobo chicken risotto from Audra’s restaurant that’s making Richie gag dramatically but actually smells really good, and Ben’s passing out shitty coffee from the cafeteria that somehow doesn’t taste as shitty now that Eddie’s not drinking it alone. Well, it still tastes just as shitty, but he doesn’t mind so much. He meets Richie’s eyes across the room, and gives him a smile that he hopes looks grateful. Richie grants him a smile in return - weak, uncertain, but a smile nonetheless.

ix.

The trouble ends - or comes to a head, really - on Christmas.

Eddie usually goes with Richie to Went and Maggie’s condo in Florida, but this year he’s staying behind in the loft. He uses the excuse of having too many shifts at the hospital, but really he asked for those shifts - after 6 months of listening to Richie through the wall, he doesn’t think he’s in the right headspace to be able to handle Christmukkah at the Toziers without having some sort of mental-emotional breakdown.

He doesn’t think he can get through 5 days of sleeping in a twin bed with Richie only a few feet away and the dog Richie made his parents adopt because it made Eddie feel better and the t-shirt he bought Richie when they were 18 that says _Happy Hanukkah, ya filthy animal,_ which Richie still wears, even though it’s threadbare and too small, now. Not knowing that he’ll only ever be a friend. Only ever be a placeholder.

He can handle Christmas alone. For the first couple days, it’s almost peaceful, the loft empty and quiet. He can do laundry whenever he wants. No one’s leaving dishes in the sink, or flushing the toilet when he’s in the shower, or tracking snowmelt in through the front door.

Christmas Eve hits him like a ton of bricks.

The Losers all call, most of them while he’s at work - he listens to their voicemails in the empty locker room, the only intern who volunteered to stay on, and smiles so hard his cheeks hurt, mostly to keep himself from crying. He hears their voices - Mike home in Derry, Bev and Ben with Ben’s mom out in California, Bill and Audra with her family in Kentucky, Stan and Patty on a bird watching cruise in the Amazon, all of them spread out over the earth - and suddenly he can see them all as kids, skinned knees and short shorts and big fucking smiles, running roughshod through Derry like the menaces to public health that they were.

Suddenly he misses them all terribly.

He hears all the saddest Christmas songs in the car on the way home - _you should be here with me, baby please come home_. He stops at crosswalks for families bundled up in scarves and mittens and knit hats, for couples sharing cups of hot cocoa - suddenly it seems like no one in the entire city is alone. Eddie’s the only one, and he realizes, whatever pain he would’ve had to endure at the Toziers, with Richie, it would be better than this. Being with Richie is always better than being by himself.

Richie calls right as Eddie’s walking in the loft door. Eddie drops his bag by his shoes and takes out his phone, stares at the dumb selfie that’s Richie’s contact photo, and considers not answering - it’s only going to make him sadder. But the last second he’s struck with a visceral need to hear Richie’s voice, and answers.

“ _Eddie_ ,” Richie says, before Eddie can say anything. _“Shit, I know you’re supposed to do this sort of thing on Christmas morning, but I can’t wait. Check in my laundry basket.”_

Eddie frowns. “What?”

_“My laundry basket, Eds. It’s the one place I could hide something where I knew you wouldn’t accidentally find it - you treat other people’s laundry like it’s toxic waste.”_

“Maybe if you did laundry more than twice a year,” Eddie mutters, but he’s already walking down the hall to Richie’s room.

He hesitates outside the door, feeling like he’s about to cross some sort of threshold into completely uncharted territory, but Richie’s impatient in his ear and if Richie wants Eddie in his bedroom, who’s Eddie to argue? He puts Richie on speakerphone so he can bitch about this while he’s digging through Richie’s laundry, but it only takes a few seconds to find the gift. It’s wrapped, which means someone else must be in on this - Richie’s hopeless at gift wrapping. Eddie usually does it for him, but Eddie knows he didn’t do this. “What’s this, Rich?” he asks.

“ _Merry Christmas, Eds,”_ Richie says, instead of answering.

“You didn’t have to get me anything. You guys are already giving me so much, with med school - ”

“ _Oh, just open it,”_ Richie insists. “ _Come on, you know you want to._ ”

Eddie doesn’t grace that with a reply, but he _does_ want to. He rips the paper off, and inside is - it’s a photo.

A framed photo, of him and Richie, 13 years old, mugging for the camera in Santa suits that are way too big for them. Eddie remembers that day. They’d stolen the Santa suits from the Christmas village that was in town for the day, skidded down main street over ice and snow trailing the suits behind them like matadors’ capes, daring the angry elves behind them to catch them, tipsy on top shelf bourbon that Bev had lifted from the liquor store and on top of the fucking world. Richie hadn’t stopped making jokes about Eddie sitting in his lap all day, and eventually, just to get him to shut up - Eddie had done it. Richie had shot up out of his chair like someone had lit a fire under him, they’d crashed together on the floor in a tangle of felt fabric and hats and fake beards and Ben had shouted, “Say ‘ho, ho, ho!’” and then a camera flash went off.

Eddie’s never seen this photo before. He hasn’t even thought about that day until right now, sitting in Richie’s empty room in the Losers’ empty loft, completely hamstrung.

Richie’s saying something, still on speaker. Eddie hangs up. He can’t talk right now.

Because when he thinks about it - looking at this photo that Richie somehow held onto all these years - what he’s doing is stupid. It’s so, so stupid, keeping a secret this big from his best fucking friend, even if the secret is that he’s in love with him. Yeah, Richie’s probably gonna tease him about it - since he definitely doesn’t feel the same way - but maybe it will work the same way Richie’s jokes about Eddie’s mom and the Munchausen by proxy worked. Maybe telling Richie - getting it out in the open - will make it hurt less.

Richie always makes things hurt less. Eddie suddenly knows, with absolute, bone-deep certainty, that he can make this hurt less, too. Eddie should’ve told him ages ago.

The airport is a fucking nightmare.

Any airport on any normal day is a nightmare for Eddie, but Christmas Eve has compounded everything tenfold - and added with the stress of what he’s flying to Florida to do, he ends up popping enough Xanax that he’s sort of surprised he doesn’t keel over from a heart attack on the plane. It would be pretty funny, he thinks, to have the stewardess kneeling over him yelling, “Is there a doctor on board?!” and be able to say - with his dying breath - “I’m a doctor.” That’s good material for a joke. He’ll tell Richie, when he gets to the condo.

If he ever fucking makes it to the condo.He tries to ignore the literal billions of germs flying through the air around him, people sneezing and kids touching things with their grubby little hands, wipes down the arms of his seat with enough disinfectant to kill a culture of marburg virus. It will be all be fine when he gets there, he tells himself. Even if he’s sick when he lands, Richie will be there - he’ll tell Richie how he feels and Richie will make fun of him ( _Aw, Eds, you’re in love with me? That’s adorable.)_ and feed him endless chocolate gelt coins while they curl up with the husky on Richie’s parents’ couch and watch _Die Hard_ 1 and 2.

It’ll be fine, he reminds himself, standing at the condo’s front door at 2 a.m. Christmas morning. It’s him and Richie. Him and Richie. And Richie’s an idiot, anyways. There’s no reason to be afraid of him.

It’s too late to knock, so Eddie texts Richie’s phone, because he knows he’ll be awake. Even though he’s not Christian, he can never sleep on Christmas Eve - too much excitement in the general vicinity of everywhere, he always says. He’s probably playing Mortal Kombat or something on the shitty Sega Genesis he keeps down here - Eddie swears he hears Richie’s phone ping somewhere in the condo, and imagines him coming out of his video game daze to pick up the phone and blink at Eddie’s message - _let me in, I don’t want to wake your parents_ \- for a few seconds before he starts to understand it.

The door swings open, and there he is.

He’s wearing the _Happy Hanukkah, ya filthy animal_ shirt and a pair of red and green striped boxers, hair a mess, squinting at Eddie in the hall light like he’s some sort of cave dwelling creature that hasn’t seen the sun in months, and Eddie - Eddie loves him terribly.

“Eds?” Richie starts to say. “You’re here. What are you - ”

“Christmas alone was a terrible idea,” Eddie blurts. It’s not what he meant to say at all, but he rolls with it. “I hate being away from you on a normal day, let alone during the holidays.”

Richie starts to look very, very cautious. “Eds...”

“No, just let me get this out.” Eddie gives him a quelling look, and Richie nods, still like he’s afraid of whatever Eddie’s about to say. Eddie wishes he could assure him everything’s going to be alright, but he doesn’t know what words are going to come out of his mouth, so he can’t promise anything. “Richie, I - jesus christ, I never thought I was gonna tell you this. But then that dumb fucking picture, and - you’re the only one I can tell anything to - I mean, _anything,_ and if I don’t tell someone I literally think I’m gonna explode. So, I hope you don’t, like, hate me after this, but - ”

“Never, Eds,” Richie assures him softly. “I could never hate you.”

“Good.” Eddie shuffles his feet, suddenly out of steam. “Good, that’s good. Because I’m pretty sure I’ve been in love with you since I was like 12 fucking years old.”

Richie looks kind of like he did that one time Mike ran him over with his bike. “You’re pretty sure?”

“I’m sure,” Eddie amends. “I’m 100% sure. God, I love you so fucking much.”

Richie makes a noise like he made when they tried to pick him up off the pavement - surprised, pained. And then he steps out into the hallway, barefoot in his boxers, takes Eddie’s head between his hands and kisses him.

Now _Eddie’s_ the one making a noise like he’s hurt. He grabs onto the front of Richie’s t-shirt and kisses back clumsily - he hasn’t kissed anyone since high school - and feels his heart sprout wings and start fluttering around in his chest, because _oh god, oh god_ , Richie’s kissing him. Richie’s pulling him inside his parents’ condo and backing him into the door and pressing his whole body forward into Eddie’s, and Eddie’s never been so turned on in his fucking life.

“I love you,” he makes sure to say again, when Richie breaks away - just to check he heard. “You’re it for me, Rich, you’ve always been it for me. Always.”

Richie’s glasses are fogged, but he holds Eddie’s head in his hands and Eddie’s pretty sure he’s crying. No, he’s 100% sure he’s crying. “I love you, too,” Richie says, choked up. “I never thought - fuck, you’re my best friend, Eds. There’s no one else in the entire fucking world who - I don’t even know how to say it.”

“It’s okay,” Eddie says. “I know, I get it. Me too.”

He squeezes Richie’s sides - the extra padding he knows Richie’s self-conscious about but that Eddie loves, that Eddie thinks about when he touches himself - and in the close dark space between their faces, Richie breaks into the most beautiful smile Eddie’s ever seen, flushed and teary, mouth turned up at the corners - all of him, every inch of him, the love of Eddie’s fucking life.

Eddie kisses him again, because he can’t _not_ , not now that he’s allowed, and Richie melts against him, big and heavy and almost half a foot taller than him, but Eddie takes all his weight, gathers him in close against himself.

After about a million years - after they fall on Maggie and Went’s couch in a puff of husky hair and sink in a quiet pool of nicknames and _don’t call me that_ and the sound their mouths make against each other, after Eddie tells Richie he’s only ever had sex once and Richie has to press his forehead against Eddie’s sternum to calm down, after the dog wakes up and comes trotting into the room and they have to bribe her not to bark and wake Richie’s parents with a slice of lunchmeat ham from the fridge - Richie stands in the hallway outside the room with the twin beds and looks at Eddie with _intent_.

Eddie swallows. He thinks of hearing Richie through the walls and coming so hard he whited out, biting his pillows to keep from making noise. He’s as nervous as he is excited, but it’s Richie. He trusts Richie.

“Yeah,” he breathes. “Okay. But I need a shower, I was just on an airplane.”

“Need help?” Richie asks, for what must be the millionth time since Eddie’s known him.

For the first time in human history, Eddie says, “Yes.”

x.

Apparently Richie’s not the only one who’s loud as fuck in bed.

Eddie comes that first night with Richie’s hand pressed over his mouth, tongue pressed to his salty palm, not even caring that he doesn’t know the last time Richie washed his hands. And it turns out good sex - or just sex with Richie - is really, _really_ fantastic, and mortifying, and perfect, so much so that Eddie can’t stop blushing all through breakfast Christmas morning, making waffles with the Toziers, who are delighted to find he arrived in the night, Richie squeezing his ass whenever he sees an opening.

The rest of the Losers give them shit for it when they all get home - but then Richie and Eddie record the screaming cat noises Bev and Ben make when they’re at it and Bill saying very loudly H-H-HOLY LORD, and everyone makes a solemn and unspoken agreement to never bring it up again.

Eddie still doesn’t quite believe it, sometimes, when he wakes up in the tangle of Richie’s octopus limbs or Richie slides down his body to wake him with a sloppy, happy blowjob or smiles dopily at him through the chaos of an absolutely depraved game of Monopoly and mouths _Love you_ \- that he gets to have this. That he gets to have his best friend and amazing sex and laughing so hard his sides hurt, packaged up in words like _forever_ and _always_.

But if anyone’s ever going to get Eddie to stop worrying, it’s Richie. It’s always, forever _-_ Richie.


End file.
